It was past midnight. Stanislav Petrov was on duty in a secret nuclear weapons monitoring command center. The walls around him were layer upon layer of thick concrete. The Russian had attended a military college in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. But the lieutenant colonel was not an officer in the Ukrainian army. His job was in defense of the Soviet Union, the communist dictatorship that was in a Cold War with the United States after World War II until the late 1980s. Both the Russians and the Americans had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over. The date was September 26, 1983. Little did the people in New York, who might have been cooking dinner, know that the 44-year-old would soon make sure they could go to bed safely. – I am no hero. I was just in the right place at the right time, Petrov said in the Danish documentary “The man who saved the world”. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was responsible for the satellite-based nuclear weapons monitoring of the Soviet Union. Photo: Pavel Golovkin / AP The Empire of Evil When Petrov sat in the bunker a few hours earlier, three weeks had passed since Soviet fighter jets shot down a Korean airliner on its way from New York in the USA to Seoul in South Korea. This map shows the route that the passenger plane KAL 007 followed, and what was the usual route from the USA to South Korea. Illustration: CIA / Wikimedia Commons Instead of flying the usual route outside the Soviet Union, the Korean pilot took a “shortcut”. That error caused Korean Air Lines Flight 007 to fly in over the Kamchatka Peninsula, southeast of Russia. Soviet fighters followed. They suspected that the passenger plane was engaged in espionage. After an hour, and at least two warning shots, the plane was shot down. 269 people died. Ronald Reagan was the President of the United States from 1981 to 1989. He used a harsh tone against the Soviet Union at the start of his presidency. Photo: Ira Schwarz / Ap The American president Ronald Reagan called it a massacre, and used the shooting as an additional reason to deploy cruise missiles in West Germany. They should be able to take less than 10 minutes to reach Moscow. It was also less than half a year since Reagan had called the Soviet Union “the evil empire”. In the documentary, Stanislav Petrov said that the situation could not be worse. – One wrong move, and everything would go to hell. The alarm When Petrov took over command in the bunker, he received a handover from those who were going to go to bed. All systems worked as they should, and the lieutenant colonel and the others set about their duties. The Soviet Union had several satellites in space that would alert them as early as possible if the United States launched intercontinental ballistic missiles loaded with nuclear weapons. At least one of them monitored the airspace over the US on 26 September. At 00:15 Russian time, something happened. Something completely unusual. The alarm started to howl. On the screens in front of them, the Soviet soldiers saw the word LAUNCH in large red letters. The computer system reported that a nuclear missile had been launched from an American military base on the west coast of the United States. Stanislav was the most responsible person in the bunker. He ordered the others to check the systems. It was only about 20 minutes until the bomb hit somewhere in the Soviet Union. What would Petrov do? Should he notify management? Would they respond with an attack that would leave the United States in ruins? The race Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was born in Vladivostok in 1939, the year Adolf Hitler started the Second World War. The Russian grew up under the communist dictatorship of Josef Stalin, with the United States as the great enemy. The first and for the time being the last attack with atomic bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, was made when Petrov was about six years old. The two cities were completely destroyed by one of the worst weapons created by mankind, and over 230,000 people died. Before he was 13, the Soviet Union had also acquired nuclear weapons. A race to exterminate the enemy was underway. In primary schools in the United States, children were trained to throw themselves under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack. According to Petrov himself, he did not really want to join the military as a young man. It was his parents who pushed him into the defence. – Then they avoided the trouble of taking care of me, he said in the Danish documentary. He received his education at a military college in Kyiv, the capital of today’s Ukraine. In 1972, he started in the Soviet air force, and worked his way up higher and higher in the system. Stanislav Petrov went through the ranks in the Soviet defense before resigning from his job in 1984. Photo: Nikolai Ignatiev / Alamy Stock Photo When the 80s started, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States entered a new and more dangerous period. In the midst of all this, Petrov continued to go to work as usual. But nothing was as usual on this autumn night. Doubt The American Minuteman missiles, which could be launched from the ground, were supposed to fly up into space, before finally being sent down towards their target. The Soviet space probes were tasked with reporting if they detected the unusual flame from the rockets against the cold space as a background. In the computer systems that Petrov monitored, there was no doubt. The signal was completely reliable. The infrared instruments that were supposed to capture the heat from the nuclear rocket confirmed that they were on their way. But in addition to the space probes, the Soviet Union had radars that could detect missiles. Petrov wasn’t sure what the computers were telling him. He wanted a confirmation from the radars. Rockets on their way Then the screens in the bunkers lit up again. – The second missile was launched. Then the third, the fourth and the fifth, he told in an interview with the BBC. The computers in front of him changed notice. Suddenly it said “missile attack”. Only a few minutes had passed since he learned of the first rocket. – Within 15 minutes they would appear on the radar screens. And after a while they would explode over the heads of our people, he said in the same interview. The military forces of the Soviet Union would be put on full combat alert if he sounded the alarm further. – Ballistic missiles with over 11,000 warheads. They would make the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like toys! Over 230,000 Japanese were killed by two American atomic bombs at the end of World War II. Photo: Stanley Troutman / Ap He believed all the Soviet General Staff needed to do was push a few buttons. – I understood that no one would test me. No one would dare. They would agree. And what if I was wrong? For every minute Petrov and the others in the bunker spent assessing whether the systems were right or wrong, the leadership of the country lost time to decide what to do. System error Petrov limped along. He was unsure whether the computer systems could be trusted. – There was no rule for how long we could think before we reported an attack. But we knew that every second of procrastination was wasting valuable time. That the military and political leadership of the Soviet Union had to be notified without delay, he told the BBC. Finally he made up his mind. He picked up the phone and called headquarters. It was just an error in the warning system, he said. If he blundered, it wouldn’t be long before the first nuclear bomb went off. – 23 minutes later it dawned on me that nothing had happened. If it had been a real attack, I would have already known. It was a great relief. Theories In the aftermath, Petrov and the others desperately searched for the reason why the systems were warning of an attack that was never coming. But they did not find out for sure how the error occurred. – It was obviously the universe playing tricks on us. In retrospect, there have been several theories about what actually happened. Was it sunlight hitting some clouds that fooled the Soviet early warning system? Or was it something else entirely? No one has been able to find out for sure. Petrov did not receive a medal from the commanders of the military or the leaders of the communist dictatorship. Instead, he was slammed for not properly recording the computer error. Less than a year later, he quit the military to take care of his cancer-stricken wife. He is also said to have had several nervous breakdowns after the Soviet Union disintegrated and the Cold War finally ended. Did he prevent doomsday? The Soviet Union and the United States had enormous amounts of nuclear weapons in the 1980s. According to an American report from 1979, a full nuclear war would lead to between 130 and 290 million people dying in a short time. In 2013, Stanislav Petrov received a German peace prize for averting a nuclear war. But it is not certain that his decision was absolutely decisive for the world not ending in a nuclear disaster in 1983. Pavel Podvig is a researcher at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research. In addition, he runs the website Russian Forces, which collects information about Russian nuclear weapons. He is one of the people who knows the most about how the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons systems worked. Pavel Podvig is one of the world’s leading experts on Russian and Soviet nuclear weapons. Photo: Russian Forces Project He says the Soviet system, unlike the American one, was not prepared to respond to a nuclear bomb attack based only on what their warning systems told them. Instead, the Soviet Union was prepared to wait until the first atomic bombs hit them, before possibly using their own nuclear weapons. Among other things, many in the Soviet defense were skeptical about the computer systems they had. So was Petrov. – His story shows that people are an important part of this. It is important that people are not like robots, which only relay signals from one place to another. It is important that people make such decisions and think carefully about them, says Podvig to news. Top secret Stanislav Petrov kept what happened in the bunker on September 26, 1983 a secret from everyone. Not even his wife found out what he didn’t do. It was only in the late 1990s that the story became known. Then one of his superiors wrote a book about his life. Stanislav Petrov died on May 19, 2017. He himself had no doubt that if he had confirmed that there was an attack, many people would die. He told that in the Danish documentary. – Do you think nuclear weapons will be used again? – I think so, yes. It is absurd. We have learned nothing from the past. We must learn to live together as brothers. Otherwise we will die out, like the dinosaurs. (Source: The documentary “The Man Who Saved The World”, BBC, Russian Forces project, Vox)
ttn-69
The man who saved the world from the atomic bomb and war – Long reading from news Trøndelag
